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Our Perspective

What this means for leaders navigating growth, change or transformation in their organisation.

The Quiet Cost

Value rarely disappears in one event; it seeps away through small misalignments that compound. The most common culprit is short-term optimisation that pushes brand stewardship to the sidelines. When the story fragments—across sales, product, service, and recruitment—you see conversion soften, discounting creep in, and trust thin out because experience doesn’t match the promise. The leak is quiet, then suddenly visible.

Interbrand, reported by Marketing Dive, estimates that a tilt to short-term performance tactics has left the top 100 brands with roughly $200 billion in unrealised revenue—evidence that near-term wins often mask longer-term loss.

What Ownership Means

A senior brand leader isn’t the sponsor of a launch; they’re the owner of ongoing alignment. That means owning the commercial narrative, codifying how decisions get made, and creating the conditions for adoption at speed. In our experience with mid‑market organisations, the decisive shift is treating brand as an operating system for growth, not a campaign.

What this looks like in practice:

• Anchor the messaging hierarchy to pricing, pipeline stages, and sales enablement.
• Set clear decision rights and guardrails, with a lightweight cross‑functional forum to resolve trade‑offs quickly.
• Equip teams and partners with training, practical tools, and templates built for everyday use.

Signals That Matter

If you can’t measure the drivers, you can’t manage the drift. A useful scorecard links brand activity to commercial signals so leaders can intervene early and confidently. Keep it simple, comparable, and tied to choices the organisation can act on, not vanity measures that flatter without guiding decisions.

Track three groups of signals:

• Demand: share of search, qualified pipeline mix, conversion through targeted narratives.
• Value: price realisation, sales cycle time, win‑loss reasons mapped to positioning.
• Trust: retention, referral rates, and experience consistency across priority journeys.

BCG notes that companies cutting brand investment saw around a 0.8‑point market‑share decline—an illustration that underfunding brand quickly shows up in commercial performance.

Cadence And Governance

Ownership is expressed in cadence: a predictable rhythm that aligns story, standards, and sequencing. The Chief Brand Officer should steward a rolling roadmap that phases shifts across product, service, and talent, ensuring internal adoption keeps pace with external claims. This isn’t bureaucracy; it’s how you protect price, speed decisions, and build confidence.

Leadership implications to hold:

• Install a quarterly brand–commercial review that ties narrative and assets to pipeline, retention, and hiring.
• Publish a single cross‑functional roadmap so teams move together and approvals compress.
• Protect the brand bedrock in downturns; adjustment is fine, abandonment is costly.

Treat brand ownership as a system, and value compounds through consistency that markets notice and teams can deliver.

Sources:

• Don't Cut Your Brand‑Marketing Budget. Rethink It. — BCG
• How a focus on performance marketing has cost brands trillions: report — Interbrand via Marketing Dive

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